These questions aim to help the class participants in reading and analyzing the required and optional texts. All other questions are welcome.
Class I: Alienated Labor, Value Production and Marx's Alternative
January 29, 2017
2:30-4:30 p.m.
1. What are the four types of alienation that
Marx discusses in the essay on “Alienated Labor” in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844?
2. Why does Marx say
the following in “Alienated Labor”? “Although private property appears to be the
basis and cause of alienated labor, it is rather a consequence of the latter”?
3. What does Marx
mean in the following statement in “Alienated Labor”? “Even
the equality of incomes which Proudhon demands would only change the relation
of the present-day worker to his work into a relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an
abstract capitalist.”
4. Why does Marx
begin Capital with a chapter on “the commodity”?
5. What is the dual
character of the commodity?
6. What is the dual
character of labor under capitalism?
7. What is the
substance of value?
8. What is “socially
necessary labor time” and how is it related to the amount of value of a
commodity?
9. What is the form
of value? How does Marx’s discussion of
the form of value respond to Samuel Bailey’s critique of David Ricardo?
10. Why does Marx
say that “the fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar
social character of the labor which produces them”?
11. Summarize the
four examples that Marx offers after this statement: “The whole mystery of
commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor
on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to
other forms of production.”
12. How is the
fourth example, “an association of free human beings,” similar to and different
from the other three examples?
13. According to
David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, what are the “foundational contradictions of
capitalism”? Compare and contrast these to Marx’s discussion of “alienated labor” in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and of “the dual character of labor" in chapter 1 of Capital.
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